03 September 2008

Taking the next giant leap into space: Peter Diamandis on TED.com

X Prize founder Peter Diamandis lays out several very good reasons to keep exploring space -- and he talks about how, with the help of the X Prize and other incentives, we're going to do just that. He also talks about the next phase of the X Prize, driving radical breakthroughs in many technologies that benefit humanity. (And listen for the frank and funny story of exactly how the first X Prize was funded.) (Recorded July 2005 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 15:31.)

Watch Peter Diamandis' 2005 talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 285+ TEDTalks -- including many more talks about space.

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01 July 2008

Flying Stephen Hawking into zero g: Peter Diamandis on TED.com

X Prize founder Peter Diamandis talks about how he helped Stephen Hawking fulfill his dream of going to space -- by flying together into the upper atmosphere and experiencing weightlessness at zero g. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 04:01.)

Watch Peter Diamandis' 2008 talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances -- including Stephen Hawking's 2008 TEDTalk about humanity's greatest questions.

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29 February 2008

TED2008: What Stirs Us?

(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session ten.)

Anthropologist Helen Fisher studies romantic love -- its evolution, its biochemical foundations, and its importance to human society. She gave a talk at TED2006 (watch the video). Her current research is on why we fall in love and how.
In the jungle of Guatemala, she says, stands a temple. It was built by the king of the Mayas, who was buried under it when he died. Mayan inscription proclaims that he was deeply in love with his wife, so he built a temple on her honor facing his. The sun rises behind one and sets behind the other: after 30'000 years these two people still kiss from their tombs. Anthropologists have not find any society that doesn't know love.
Have you ever been rejected by somebody you really loved? Have you ever dumped someone who really loved you? About 97% of people, men and women, say yes to those questions. Romantic love is one of the most powerful sensations on Earth. We are currently looking at the data of brain scans of people that have just been dumped, and we find alot of activity in the region associated with romantic love. We found activity in other brain regions also, in one associated with calculating gains and losses.
What have I learned? Romantic love is a universal human drive -- not the sex drive -- that it allows you to focus your energy into a single energy. Of all the poems, Plato: "the God of love lives in the state of need". Love is a need, like hunger and thirst. I have come to believe that romantic love is also an addiction. It has all of the characteristics of an addiction, you focus on a person, you obsess about him/her, you need to see more of her/him. Romantic love is one of the most addictive substances  on Earth.
Animals also love. There is not a single animal on this planet that would copulate with anything that comes along, unless you're stuck in a lab cage. I've looked at 100 species and everywhere in the wild animals have favorites.
Our newest experiment -- putting people who report they're still in love in a long-lasting relationship into the functional MRI. And we find the same data, that region of the brain still becomes active 25 years later.
Why do you fall in love with one person rather than another? Match.com came to me three years ago and asked me that question, and I've researched it ever since. Psychologists tell you that we tend to fall in love with people with the same general level of intelligence, good looks, values, social status, but we don't know what makes two personalities really stick together to form a stable couple. I've concocted a questionnaire to analyze -- through biochemical analysis --  who chooses whom to love.

David Griffin is the director of photography for the National Geographic magazine -- the Vatican of photography. On his blog, Editor's Pick, he discusses the creation of the extraordinary photos published in the magazine.
He starts by showing some great -- truly awesome -- pictures by NG photographs, including the iconic portrait of the "Afghan Girl", Sharbat Gula (picture right) photographed by Steve McCurry and who did the NG cover in 1985.
Last year NG has added a section to their website ("Your Shot") where anyone can submit photographs to be considered for publication -- and it has been a runaway success. Everyone of us has one or two great photographs in us, but to be a great photojournalist you need to take great photos all the time.
Griffin goes on to tell great stories of photojournalism: in African national parks, in Indian slums, underwater in Baja California and New Zealand, in Chinese jellyfish markets, in the military medical system in Irak, etc.
Photography can be used to address our biggest issues. But sometimes photojournalism is just plain interesting or fun. Photography can make a real connection to people, and can be employed as a positive agent to understand the challenges and opportunities facing us today.

Peter Diamandis, founder of the X-Prize and advocate of the private exploration of space.
When I met Stephen Hawking (who spoke on Wednesday at TED), he told me his dream was to travel into space. I told him I could not take him there, but I could take him to weightlessness. The way to do so is through parabolic flights (fly up, then go into free fall, which gives you a few dozens seconds of weightlessness). And so we brought Stephen Hawking there (picture left - see video).

Chris Abani is a Nigerian writer and political activist (twice imprisoned and tortured in his country). His 2004 novel "GraceLand" is a bitterly funny tale of a young Nigerial Elvis impersonator in Lagos. Abani was a speaker at TEDGLOBAL in Tanzania, last year.
My search is to find stories of everyday people that transcend us, that don't look away at the reality: we are never more beautiful than when we are ugly. What I've come to learn is that the world is never seen in the grand gestures, but in the accumulation of the simple, soft, selfless acts of compassion. In South Africa they say "Ubuntu": the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me. Which means that there is no way for us to be human without other people.
So Abani tells stories of people. People standing up to soldiers wanting to kill them. People being compassionate. People being human, reclaiming their humanity, recognizing that we are surrounded by amazing people, who offer all of us the mirror to a whole humanity.

Benjamin Zander has been for almost 30 years the conductor of the Boston Philarmonic -- and a speaker on leadership. He uses music to help people open their minds.
"There are people that think that classical music is dying, and others who think that we haven't seen anything yet. Rather than going into statistics of orchestras dying, we should do an experiment." He is on stage with a piano, and uses it to play Chopin and tell stories of musical learning and amazement, walking around on stage and down into the audience, and at the end of his speech, he gets the TEDsters to stand and sing Beethoven's "Ode to Joy". (They distribute the text written phonetically, but as a German speaker, I can't read it -- I'd never realized that if you speak a language, it's very difficult to read its phonetic rendering -- so I have to look up the original text: "Freude, schöner Götterfunken...")

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06 September 2007

First look at Branson/Rutan's space terminal

Making private space travel possible and accessible to everyone has been a recurring topic at recent TED conferences, discussed by speakers such as Burt Rutan at TED 2006 (watch his speech), Peter Diamandis at TEDGLOBAL 2005, Richard Branson at TED 2007 and others. This week the first images of the central terminal and hangar facility at New Mexico's future private spaceport have been released:

Designed by engineering firm URS Corp and by architect Norman Foster, the structure, called Spaceport America, will serve as the operating basis for Branson's Virgin Galactic suborbital spaceliners, which are being built at Scaled Composites in California, founded by Rutan. Construction of the spaceport should begin in 2008.

Details in this story by Space.com.

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11 October 2006

Rocket Racing League: Nascar in the sky

Fifteen months after disseminating hints at TEDGLOBAL in Oxford, XPrize's Peter Diamandis and his posse are getting ready to annouce their plans for the first Rocket Racing League (RRL) races.

The RRL is a racing competition akin to Nascar, with cars replaced by rocket-powered aircrafts called X-Racers that will zip around a virtual track in the sky at speeds of more than 300 miles per hour (the image is an artist's rendering). Five miles around, the three-dimensional track would exist only on the pilot's head-mounted displays (which are called Augmented Reality System) and on the spectators' GPS devices. The pilots would race several laps before landing for refueling (pit-stop) and then taking off again. The competition may be made more difficult by obstacles such as inflatable pylons or balloons - or lights and lasers during nighttime races.

The first official RRL race will take place in 2007, at a date and location that will be disclosed next week during the XPrize Cup, a large space fair and exposition held in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where the League is headquartered. "We expect up to 8 pilots to participate, all flying at first the same model of X-Racer", says Mike D'Angelo, the VP of Technology for the RRL.

In Las Cruces the Mark-1 X-Racer will be on display - that's the development prototype of the rocket craft. Besides the competition and the fun (and the business - revenue is projected at US$150 million a year by 2010), Diamandis and co-founder Granger Whitelaw expect the RRL to act as an accelerator of technology developments in the areas of propulsion and spacecraft design.

(Cross-posted on LunchOverIP)

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16 May 2006

WIRED Rave Awards for Cameron Sinclair, Peter Diamandis, Saul Griffith ...

TEDPrize winner Cameron Sinclair is having a very good year. Fresh on the heels of both the TEDPrize and the RISD/Target Emerging Designer Award, tonight he'll receive a WIRED Rave Award, recognizing him and his wife/Architecture for Humanity co-founder Kate Stohr for innovation in architecture.

WIRED is also raving about other TED speakers, who'll be honored tonight in San Francisco and profiled in the June magazine. These include X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis (for Science), and inventor Saul Griffith — or rather, his company, Squid Labs (for industrial design).

The annual WIRED Maverick award will be awarded collectively to four individuals — George Clooney, Jeff Skoll, Steven Soderbergh and TEDster Mark Cuban — representing the "New Hollywood." And a new award has been added: "Faced with the prospect of handing out yet another well-deserved Rave Award to Steve Jobs, WIRED's editors took the unprecedented step of creating a separate award in his honor," the press release explains. "The inaugural Steve Jobs Award, recognizing sustained excellence and creative genius, goes to ... Steve Jobs."

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